Build an Adventure in Your Forest

This spring students at East Montpelier Elementary School launched the beginning of our most popular ECO lesson to date.  These kindergarten and first graders at EMES were really looking to put their big creative energy to use. We presented the students with a wide variety of tools and inclusions. If you had ropes, buckets, carabiners, and a pulley what could you do? These students jumped in with ideas and focus that turned into The ECO Carnival. Ropes were soon being weaved between trees and buckets hung from various heights. By paying a carnival designer an American Beech leaf,  you could choose from a selection of forest grown games.  Your prize for landing a snowball in a moving bucket? Two large White Pine branches decorated with green twine. A trophy of sorts!

In another, much quieter area of the forest, students pounded charcoal and elderberries in The Pencil Store. Other children silently carved red osier and striped maple branches into pencils with a tool of choice, the Lancashire Potato Peeler.  Paper and journals were brought out of backpacks and soon students were writing letters and secret messages with their new handcrafted pencils with elderberry ink. Deliveries were made by messengers throughout the forest.  Who wants to buy a pencil at The Pencil Store?
 

The Pencil Store is open!

Making charcoal ink

 

Composing a letter

 

 Thanks to the children at EMES we have been wrapping our year in area schools by offering the children “workshop time” in the forest during ECO. We can easily align all the learning that was happening with our new Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards. Force and motion being a very popular one!
Although, that’s not what the teachers were noticing first about their students highly focused participation during these workshop times. The option of choice, self discovery, innovation, trial and error, communication and cooperation with peers,…the list goes on.  Many amazing and creative ideas and projects have sprouted up from this time. A life size Bald Eagle nest, obstacle courses made from willow whips, a chairlift for mice, rope swings, kid sized zip lines and you can’t have a workshop without being properly fed. Dandelion Pancakes anyone?

Dandelion Blossoms for Cooking

Ken makes the best pancakes EVER!

 

Around the fire, we are cooking and relaxing.


 

Whittling with Kids

The Forest School students have had a super fun time honing their whittling skills this fall using potato peelers.  As soon as the single-pivot potato peelers were introduced, these kindergarten and first graders enthusiastically took to experimenting with whittling:

 

They made crafts, like this God's eye in a homemade frame:

 

 

With so many beautiful goods created over the course of a few weeks, everyone wanted to create a store to sell their wares!  A name was voted on, which was the "Fire Whittlers" and friends and family were invited to shop during the last Forest School session before the holiday break.  Here are the students making price tags for their goods:

 

When the parents arrived, they were instructed how to "Fox-walk" up to our basecamp:

 

 

Here are our guests arriving through the forest: 

 

One vendor selling a fishing pole:

 

We finished off the afternoon with a Thanksgiving circle, where parents, grandparents, students, North Branch staff and friends shared one thing that they were thankful for.  It was a beautiful afternoon with lots of wonderful learning that took place!

Insect Hotels, Potato Peelers, and Spy Cameras?

Collecting materials

Children are scampering about collecting materials along the edge of the field for an Insect Hotel. Arms and backpacks are overflowing with dried grasses, pieces of bark, handfuls of soil, sticks, leaves, and stones.
"I see something red for the hotel! It's a stick! Insects would like that in their hotel. Oh, it's a living a tree. Can we pick some Amy?"
The students have found a large stand of redosier dogwood. They are fascinated by the color and the flashing of red on a bleak November day. I explain it would be okay for us to take a small sample since there is so much. I cut a branch and divide it amongst them. They know this is special and they carefully slide their red stick into their pockets.
The collection and wandering continues for an hour. Many discoveries are made by these scavenging 1st and 2nd graders. A dead poplar tree being visited by woodpeckers, balsam pitch that makes your fingers stick together, and the "AH - Tree" that when it's buds are crushed smells spicy and good.

We haven't even started building yet! And what is an insect hotel anyways?

Insect Hotels are heavy

Many 1st and 2nd graders in Vermont study insects as part of their science curriculum. Within the medium of science students also wrote, sketched, read, and sang all about insects. Lets not forget about math as well! On this ECO day students from Moretown Elementary and East Montpelier Elementary Schools are building winter homes for their insect friends.
Where do insects live? What do insects need in order to survive?  Where do insects go in the winter? Do they hibernate or do they die? By creating a cylinder out of chicken wire students fill the hotel with their collected materials. Through the process of actively building many of these questions get answered and empathy for these small and amazing living creatures deepens.
Students were also guided in safely using potato peelers to whittle green elderberry branches. Safety is taught in small groups and the privilege of using such a new tool is taken seriously by the children. Children become immediately focused on whittling windows and spy cameras for their insects. Their is a comfortable hum of busyness while new motor skills are being practiced. It's peaceful and purposeful. Another hour passes of child led learning and inquiry.

Peeling safely

Soon the hotels are opened for business and a tour begins as each group describes their creations. Hotels with roofs, elevators, porches, 4 floors, dining rooms, windows, beds and indoor pools! Where would you like the stay tonight? How about an Insect Hotel!



A future architect

Open for business!